Texas Needs More than New State Parks
There is no time to waste: We should not be waiting decades for new state parks to open. Let's create more public lands beyond the state level.
The passing of Proposition 14 in November of 2023 was a huge win for Texans. Proposition 14 was the Centennial Parks Conservation Fund Amendment that many bipartisan groups and individuals had been involved with in getting passed through the Texas legislature and on to the ballot for Texans to approve. It was overwhelmingly supported in the last election. It came as somewhat of a bittersweet victory for me, happening just prior to the state rolling over and giving up on Fairfield Lake State Park, so I haven’t been able to get on the party bandwagon nearly as much as everyone else. The funding is much needed, more than 20 years late, and I’m here to tell you, it isn’t enough.
We need more state parks, yes, but Texas should be thinking much larger than that when it comes to conservation and preservation of our natural resources.
Texas loves its private property rights, really to a fault, and our unwillingness to see beyond our own personal fence lines is going to be our undoing. We are behind the times on conservation efforts and despite those decades of the very effective “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaigns. I think that has somewhat faded from memory from many citizens, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha most likely have no idea what that campaign is now. And, have you seen Texas roadways in the last few years? It doesn’t look good. Maybe it’s time to get Willie involved for one more round of patriotic environmental propaganda.
As Texans, we tend to do a lot of talking without a lot of substance. We pat ourselves on the back for passing a billion dollars for new state parks at the same time dawdling with the real loss of an operating state park for years. We proclaim “Everything is bigger in Texas” and then want to keep everyone out who wants to come see what we have to offer, no matter if they are Mexican (…Honduran, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan) or Californian. We mourn the loss of forests and prairies around the corner from where we live as farmers and ranchers sell to developers, who then come in and build thousands of homes, obliterating habitat for wildlife. Then we show up to the ballot box each year continually voting against our own self interests. My NextDoor is full of people lamenting the loss of these lands and yet none of them find a way to get involved, research candidates, or really do anything about it locally. It’s far easier to shrug your shoulders and say “What can I do? That’s someone else’s problem!” or “Capitalism, baby!” and move on with your life. Or, the assholes of the group who blame the aforementioned migrants from Latin America or California because that’s the easy way out, to take any kind of blame off themselves. Scapegoating always makes the ego feel better.
In 2020, a road was finally opened near me that connected and straightened another road to make a quicker route through to the Grand Parkway, Texas 99. It’s Houston’s third loop that-isn’t-quite-a-loop because it isn’t complete on the south, yet. That new road opened up a large chunk of undeveloped tracts of land that previously had very little access, and I’m not even going to tell you what 99 did to Houston sprawl. The first time I drove this new road I thought how pleasant it was as there were tall pines all around me, reminiscent of driving through one of our east Texas national forests. I knew it wouldn’t last and sure enough, tracts were slowly sold, and they’ve been clear-cut and dump trucks are continuously hauling in dirt for development. I’m still waiting for the houses to be constructed. Meanwhile, our county officials seem to have zero interest in protecting any of these open spaces in this part of the county with public parks or conservation areas to mitigate some of the growth. We are lacking in open space land for public use, including tiny playground type park spaces for residents. Back in 2017 or 2018 the county sent out an opinion questionnaire regarding roads, parks, and growth and I was very adamant about needing more park lands and conserved spaces in this part of the county because I knew growth was inevitable with the completion of two toll roads. We seem to have been forgotten.
Not far from this same area is a Harris county preserve that I’ve been visiting since we moved here in 2011 because it was easy to get to for a quick trip outdoors. It too is quickly being swallowed up by development. The former farmlands adjacent to the property are now being developed into housing, putting a squeeze on just how much this tiny preserve will be able to handle as a refuge for wildlife. The county could have easily purchased buffer tracts adjacent to these properties prior to the price of land exploding, it isn’t like they weren’t aware in their regional planning via road projects and what comes after. Parks aren’t even on their radar.
If you’ve been a reader of On Texas Nature for a while you’ll know that I lived in Florida for about 8 years after graduating college, from 2002-early 2010. I wrote a whole post about that a while back if you want to read through that. What I always appreciated about Florida was how much public land they had available to explore. And you didn’t have to drive 2 hours to go to a state park to hike or find a national forest, you could find a large county park or conservation area right there within any of the major cities. Florida has 175 state parks to our measly 88. 88 state parks in this massive state? What in the hell is wrong with us? How can we say we are the biggest and the best when we are so terrible at public land conservation?
Above is a screenshot of the Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI), which captures most of the public lands available in Florida. It’s missing some county parks that I personally know of but maybe they don’t meet some kind of threshold for being on this map. But look at that! You can actually explore the interactive map here, which will allow you to zoom in to see some of the tinier tracts within the cities that don’t quite show up at this scale.
Contrast that with this map:
The Texas map is from TPWD and it is their 2012 Inventory of Land & Water Resources Conservation & Recreation Plan - a map of the public lands by governmental and NGOs at that time. There are some discrepancies between the two maps, as I don’t think TPWD’s has some conservation easements on it that the FNAI one has, but overall, I think it is fairly comprehensive enough for comparison’s sake here.
It’s a fairly stark contrast, even in areas where there are higher density public lands, such as in central and southeast Texas. And listen, I get that some will argue that these areas of open ranch land are “conserved” by default by the landowners themselves in some manner, but I hardly count fenced-in cattle ranching or even timber farming as the most appropriate method of preservation and conservation even when done with the utmost care. Pair that with legacy ranches, especially those closer to suburban sprawl areas, being sold to developers and you can’t count on the local 500-1,000 acre ranch(es) you drove by along the I-10 corridor west of San Antonio between Boerne and Kerrville to be there in 20 years. Or even 10.
My reason for writing this essay was spurred by an article that the San Antonio News-Express had over the weekend titled 'Next golden age of Texas state parks’: Officials prepare to spend $1 billion on new parkland. It took me a bit before I could read it but someone sent me a gift link and I’m sharing it here as well. If you are like me, maybe you are curious when Texas even had a first golden age of state parks. So, I did a little digging.
The years between the 1960s and the 1980s were considered the “Golden Years”, with increased funding and support from the public to go out and purchase more tracts of land. And yes, if you look at the list of acquisitions in that linked TPW Magazine article you will see many of our current beloved state parks on that list from that time period. Some on the list are no longer part of the state park system, having been transferred to another land manager. Fairfield Lake SP is on that list, too, which I find ironic, as is Davis Hill SP which was acquired in 1983 and has never been open to the public. It is still on the list of state parks that are Coming Soon, alongside Powderhorn Ranch, Palo Pinto Mountains SP, and Chinati Mtns State Natural Area. I’m three years older than the Davis Hill acquisition and they are just now getting around to maybe opening it? I know DH SP has a lot of very rare plants and sure, maybe you spend ten years doing biological documentation on it and working on finding a way to protect it while also letting the public out there to hike and possibly camp, but forty years of state park ownership and the public hasn’t been able to get onto the property? Oh, and it gets even more irritating—Texas Monthly reported in an April 2023 piece that the park won’t open to the public until 2034! The state will have had the property for 51 years by that point.
I was very curious about this so I started Googling again and I found an article I recalled reading around when it was published back in 2013 in the Houston Chronicle: Forgotten parks languish for a decade. (That’s a gift link as well.) This article mentions four state parks, including DH SP, with a total of 48,000 acres of which there had been no funding set aside for development. 11 years ago.
Records show Texas lawmakers have not put any money into Texas Parks and Wildlife's budget for developing new parks for a decade. The park budget now under consideration for 2013-14 requests nothing for development of forgotten properties such as Davis Hill.
"It feels remiss for us to be letting potential parkland sit dormant because there's no funding," said State Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio. "But park administrators have been beaten back from the trough for so long that this year they didn't even ask."
Park administrators have been beaten back. And we wonder why no one did jack s*** for Fairfield Lake State Park?
Let’s compare some of these same parks that have been in the media this last year to showcase how we are “getting new state parks…soon” and how long they’ve been around vs when we will actually get access to them.
Palo Pinto Mtns SP: October 2011, opening to the public 2024 (hopefully) - 13 yrs
Powderhorn Ranch SP: Acquired 2014, opening to the public 2029 - 15 yrs
Albert and Bessie Kronkosky SNA: Acquired in 2011, opening to the public 2026 - 15 yrs
Chinati Mtns SNA: Acquired 1995, opening to the public 2032 - 37 yrs
Davis Hill SP: Acquired 1983, opening to the public 2034. - 51 yrs
I’m well aware there are steps that have to be taken to open up and create state parks: plenty of reporting, field surveys for flora and fauna and archaeological resources, putting in infrastructure for trails and camping and the like. But we’re taking decades to do this. It’s unacceptable. And the stories being told in the media are not sharing the realities of what has happened with just these five tracts. What is going to happen with the new lands purchased from Prop 14?
Which is why I was so very frustrated with the News-Express article. Even with $1 billion dollars in funding to purchase more lands for state parks, you still have to hire enough people to do all of this work to actually open it to the public. So we can buy all the land we want but if we’re sitting on parcels for 50 years again, many of us today won’t be around or we’ll be very old when they open. So much for the immediacy of opening a plethora of new state parks within this decade. The state legislature would be remiss to think $1 billion was enough for this project.
The thing is, places like Davis Hill could just be open to the public right now. There are many public lands throughout this country that have no developed front-country resources on them and people are allowed to hike, fish, etc, wherever, bushwhacking across the forest or desert. There is no reason some of these lands could not be accessible in some manner like this while they are waiting for development. Of course, institute rules like no hunting or no biking and no ATVs…whatever you need to get some basic public access to them now. Not in another decade.
We clearly cannot just wait on state parks for public land access in this state. The federal government needs to work on expanding the existing footprints of our national parks/preserves, forests, refuges, and grasslands in the state now and look for areas where additional federal lands could be created in the state. And more importantly, local entities should be purchasing tracts of land within our cities and counties to preserve locally important parcels for conservation. Not everything needs to have a camping opportunity, but a half mile trail to a prairie or a lake, a few miles from your house? Sounds like a great way to keep greenspaces and preserve a little bit of nature from yet another chunk of concrete being poured on top of it. I always loved Miami’s Environmentally Endangered Lands Program, because they would have small pieces of endangered habitat, like pine rockland, preserved next door to a community of townhouses and warehouses. We need more of that type of preservation in Texas, too.
I get it. Everyone and every budget is stretched thin. Or either we don’t want to or just plainly won’t spend the money needed to make these things happen. The thing is, we don’t have any time to waste. Sprawl will keep sprawling, and somehow we will find money to make new highways but not preserve open spaces to protect them from said highways.
I don’t want to wait two to three more decades for new state parks to open and I don’t think my fellow Texans want to either. Public land conservation and appropriate funding should be a priority for every elected official from the city to the federal levels.
There’s no time to waste.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.
Also, Misti, would you be willing to let me use one of your photos of place in my JOURNEY IN PLACE substack? I would give you full credit. I'm wanting to use photos from lots of people and places.
Hear, hear. Can we start with Ocmulgee National Park in Georgia???